Twitter agrees to buy artificial intelligence firm
In a blog post, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said he was buying Magic Pony Technology “so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what’s happening and why it matters, first.”
Seeking to shore up slowing growth, the social media company has recently months begun emphasising video on its site.
Magic Pony uses machine learning, a way of teaching software to perform tasks without explicit programming instructions based on pattern recognition, a technology that’s “increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter,” Dorsey said.
Twitter paid about $150m (€132.5m) for Magic Pony, according to a person familiar with the matter. The terms of the deal, which were not disclosed by Twitter, were previously reported by Tech Crunch.
Magic Pony’s technology uses artificial intelligence for visual effects. It can be used to clean up pixelated images or create new images.
It can be used to improve video streaming — especially in environments where bandwidth and connectivity isn’t ideal — or to automatically build landscapes for computer games.
The company, created in 2014 by graduates from Imperial College London with backgrounds in computer vision, mathematics and neuroscience, trains neural networks to process visual information.
The network can be taught to learn what a high-quality image looks like when converted to a lower-quality image and then can reverse this process, taking poor-quality images and turning them into high-quality ones.
Before the Twitter acquisition, Magic Pony was backed by £4.3m (€5.57) in funding, according to public filings, including two investment rounds from London-based Octopus Ventures in July 2015 and May 2016.
London venture firm Balderton Capital also was a backer. The company was valued at £21m in its last financing round in May 2016.
Many of Twitter’s competitors, including Facebook and Snapchat, are also sharpening their focus on video.
In an attempt to keep up, Twitter has been emphasising its ability to broadcast live events, including its Periscope video service, and earlier this year made a deal with the National Football League to broadcast its Thursday night games alongside relevant tweets.
Twitter buys Magic Pony Technology to boost its expertise in machine learning https://t.co/UT0UgSpgpu pic.twitter.com/a6ceew3NVA
— Bloomberg (@business) June 20, 2016
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